As the New Industrial Revolution swept across China in the 1980s, introducing the “Information Theory” to academia, a tremendous amount of heated discussions about the concept of “Information” emerged in the journalism feld. By exploring some relevant historical materials, it’s found that “Information” has experienced transformations of meanings during the 1978-1992 period. Before 1984, “Information Society” was viewed from a perspective of the political economy of communication . Later, the critical tradition disappeared along with the country’s social and political changes, and “Information” converged with “News” from the traditional journalism and “Information Theory” from the scientifc methodology, which played an important role in the rise of communication research dominated by the positivist paradigm in China. The study proposes that the transformations of “Information”, as well as the interruption of critical tradition, are bound up with the advancement of China’s journalism reform and the New Enlightenment Movement in the 1980s, which should be contextualized and understood in the history of modernization in China.